Clair de Lune
by tomboy14
Summary: Elizabeth Masen is a piano teacher frustrated by a student that's wasting her talent. But what is young Bella hiding beneath her long sleeves? AH/AU


**AN: This started out as an original short story for my creative writing class. I turn it in tomorrow for critiquing. I changed the names of the characters in the original to fit an AU Twilight fanfiction because it had inspiration from Twilight, among other things. I hope you enjoy!**

_POV: Elizabeth Masen_

**--X--**

It was Bella's left wrist again. Whenever one of my kids started to complain about their arm, their hand, their wrist, their head hurting them, it usually meant they were bored and wanted to leave early. It was a classic maneuver to try and get my sympathy. Fighting with a kid who didn't want to practice the piano anymore was not worth the effort, and unfortunately the old trick akin to "the dog ate my homework" was effective. So when Bella would, week after week, start wincing with every pressed key. When, week after week, she'd look up at me with "tears" in her eyes and say that it hurt too much to continue playing, I'd just turn away, roll my eyes, and tell her she could do some school work before her mom picked her up. I'd ask her to practice at home on her own when her wrist felt better. She'd smile, nod, and start her homework with her conveniently non-injured right hand and wrist. I always thought it was funny how it was the non-writing hand that ended up hurt.

"Ms. Elizabeth…" She gave me her look and I knew it was once again quitting time. Bella had natural talent, something I hadn't seen since my own son, and it was a shame that she wasted it with these fake injuries. But if she didn't want to learn, she didn't want to learn. I could tell she didn't practice on her own anymore.

The girl was probably going through a rough patch, too, and I knew how those things were. Bella excelled during those first six months with me, never complaining about that left wrist and always practicing at home. But once Dad went out of the picture, it stopped. Her dad used to pick her up all the time during those six months, but her mom started picking her up in his place suddenly. I never saw her dad again. He was a nice man, always smiling despite working in law enforcement and dealing with an unexpected layoff. I'd asked Bella one day how her dad was doing after not seeing him pick her up for a month, and she'd looked away from me and explained that she didn't know. Her parents were in the middle of a divorce and she wasn't allowed to see her dad at all. Mom got full custody in the end, and Dad was gone from the scene for good. That was a year ago, and things had been going downhill since.

Bella started complaining about her wrist once the divorce was finalized. She seemed mopey to me, which was understandable, but people got divorced all the time, and at the age of 10 she should be old enough to realize that things like this weren't abnormal and you just had to deal with them. She seemed distant with her mom, too, but I blamed that on her being hurt over not seeing her dad anymore combined with the beginning of puberty. Puberty just screamed mother-daughter problems. She's almost 11 now and probably, in some form of defiance, complained about a fake injury.

But I couldn't in good conscience let her stop now and lose all the progress we'd made. I wouldn't see her for another three weeks because of various outside appointments, and we really needed to finish now before we had to start from square one.

"Do you think you can finish this song without a mistake? It's only one more difficult part." I hoped she could finish this song. We'd been working on it for the last few meetings and she was steadily hitting those previously missed notes. If her wrist would stop bothering her, I'm sure we would already have finished this song.

Bella started again, wincing a bit on those first few keys before the too-long sleeves covering her arms and part of her hands got in the way. She hit a foul note, and I was wincing with her.

"Why don't you fix those sleeves of yours? You can do this!" I encouraged, praying that's all she needed to complete Debussy's famous piece.

She pulled up the long sleeves, and I saw them. I saw the purple shapes dotting her thin wrist. I saw the bruises the size of slender, feminine fingertips. She didn't seem to remember that she had them, and finished the song perfectly with minor wincing. As the last note resonated in the air, she turned to me with a proud smile that lit up her big, brown eyes for the first time in months. Bella noticed my staring at her bruises and gasped before tugging the sleeves almost violently over her wrists and hands. Sleeves so much like the masks in the poem(1) that the song she just played was based on.

I saw them, I saw beneath the mask, and I knew. But _Clair de Lune_ was finished.

**--X--**

(1)_Clair de Lune is a piece by Claude Debussy that is based on a poem by Paul Verlaine. The poem talks about clair de lune (which means moonlight) and the mask covering sadness and many more symbols that you can find by reading the poem's translation._


End file.
